I've read a few times on introduction replys of people asking "what exactly do you want to do?" and got to thinking about it for myself. Well, the thing is, I have NO idea what's what! How computers interact with one another, what makes them do what they do. I don't really even know the simple terms such as networking or routing...The very basic functions and terms. See, my problem is that I don't even know what to look up in order to learn. I've done the basic missions and used the advice from the forums to figure out stuff as I go but I quickly realized that I wasn't learning the foundations of it. I don't understand why my js injection even worked, etc etc. What should I be researching/doing?

So you know what HTML is? You know that's it's just a file given to you by a web server? JavaScript is a way of letting the browser manipulate the file in certain ways that only you see (non-permanent).

Wikipedia helps a lot when looking up basic things like networking, etc.

The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty; it's merely twice as big as it needs to be.

CoffeeAtNight wrote:Yes. I have very basic HTML knowledge from the myspace days but I never actually knew how/why it does what it does. Wiki has been a huge help and so have the articles on here.

If you are talking aobut the layouts on myspace, those are mainly CSS.

HTML is basically the main structure behind a webpage. Things such as the header, paragraphs, links, bodies, iframes, lsits, etc...

The web design language CSS can be described as the art language. CSS will take care of font's, colors, positions on where things are, how big / small things are, aligning items, etc

PHP plays an important role in web design and does amazing things with user input. For instance, if you know how to make a form in HTML you can use PHP to declare the user input to be added into a PHP page. This is useful for Printing out someone's name on a page, and storing them in variables. PHP is also used to add cookies, which will store information about the user for a declared amount of time. This is useful so that you do not have to login everytime you leave a page, and so that the page will remember who you are.

SQL is the database to store things. I will not go into great detail on this part, and will explain it to the best that I belive it works; as I am not to familiar with SQL. If you set up a MySQL database, you will be able to declare database's, table's, and column's. These will be used to store anything you like. Mostly these store the username, password, e-mail, etc..

JavaScript is a way to allow the user to interact with the page. For instance, you could add a JavaScript function onto your page that will pop up an alert box. The alert box could contain the message: "We have an important survey, would you like to take it?" The user can then choose if he/she wishes to take the survey or not. This is just a tiny example of JavaScript.

To understand how some things work, you need to put forth the effort to learning them. It seems you have not researched enough, or you are using terrible sources. If you start learning HTML, you can open a text editor of your choice, program the html code, and then save it as anything.html -- Just make sure you add the .html extension. This should allow you to get more hands on in learning how things work. I would also recommend getting an apache server for free to test out your projects. This will ensure that you can keep hands on training while programming to help understand how things work.

If you do not try and understand, then you wont. Honestly, I could probably go on and on about what you could do... However, there are probably over a thousand different people that spent hours upon hours making tutorials and videos on this very same subject. To cover all of it on this one single post would be absurd. I recommend going to codecademy.com and w3schools.com for some free tutorials on web design.

There are basically three categories to programming: interpreted languages, compiled languages, and web-design languages. It's basically how it reads above. web-design languages are used to make web-sites, and I would not call this a programming language, unless you are programming with more advanced languages such as ajax and JavaScript. Compiled languages are ones that need to be compiled first before they would run such as C++ and Java. The interpreted languages would be the languages which can be ran right after made, without the need of compilation. This would include programming languages such as Python.

Anyways, some of the information could be a bit off, I made this kind of quick without referencing to any sites. I would reccomend you not take my word for anything anyways and to go out and learn it. Everything I posted above could be a lie. It's up to you to find out ...

Regardless of whether or not it's a lie I really respect you taking the time to type all of that. I'll be honest...I just started learning about computers over the past weekend and I know I have a very long way to go but I accept that. It's way overdue for me to stop surfing time wasting sites and actually learn what it is I'm doing. I think the only problem I have is that it's so overwhelming trying to learn all of this. It feels like every time I start reading about something they touch on other subjects in the article that I have no clue about...I try to figure out what that is and there's another something I know nothing about. It's a vicious cycle.

CoffeeAtNight wrote:Regardless of whether or not it's a lie I really respect you taking the time to type all of that. I'll be honest...I just started learning about computers over the past weekend and I know I have a very long way to go but I accept that. It's way overdue for me to stop surfing time wasting sites and actually learn what it is I'm doing. I think the only problem I have is that it's so overwhelming trying to learn all of this. It feels like every time I start reading about something they touch on other subjects in the article that I have no clue about...I try to figure out what that is and there's another something I know nothing about. It's a vicious cycle.

First off, thanks for the kind words.

I would recommend going to w3schools.com first and Try their HTML studies. They tend to stay on subject, and not wander into other fields. Learning how to program is a good way to learn how things work. If you want to take something apart, it's good to know how to put it together first, or you could wind up in trouble / confused. Take the challenges on this site as you start to advance your skill, and it will eventually fit into place.

I love the fact that you know it will take time, and you are inspired to continue learning. If you keep your mind set the way it is now, except start putting some of these things into action, you will be golden.

I told him about codecademy in my orignal post. I reffered him to w3schools because he seems interested in web-desing.If he wants to delve into some JavaScript for web desing, codecademy is the place. I just don't see a high level OOP language as the way to go for a beginner. No doubts though, if he wants to step into it for real and get started, codecademy is king of the ring.